Roumania Past and Present eBook

had laid hands upon her; and spite of all her efforts
to regain her liberty he held her fast, and sent her
taskmasters as cruel and exacting as the leaders of
barbarian hordes had been before. And yet her
spirit was indomitable; bowed but not broken she continued
to live on, and ever strove for freedom. Mircea,
Stephen, Michael, those are the names which vindicate
her claim to courage, and which shield her from the
charge of cowardly submission. And next she is
the object of contention between two neighbouring
despots, the one endeavouring to hold, the other to
annex her. It is a marvelt hat between them she
was not dismembered limb from limb.

At length for her, as for all suffering peoples, the
day of liberation was at hand; the iron bonds which
Oriental despotism had forged were loosened by the
agency of Western progress, and, lightened of her load,
she this time struck a more effectual blow for liberty,
and was amongst the first to unfurl the flag of freedom
in the East. But a long succession of barbarian
governors, the license of repeated military occupations,
the proximity of Tartar savagery on the one side and
of Oriental effeminacy on the other, these incidents
of her long-continued vassalage have necessarily,
and, it is to be hoped, but for a time, left their
evil influence upon the nation, which it is now the
earnest endeavour of her patriotic leaders to exterminate.

[Footnote 193: Ozanne, p. 226.]

CHAPTER XV.

PRESENT ROUMANIAN LEADERS AND THEIR POLICY.

The King—­Customs of the
Court—­The Queen—­Her attainments—­Extract
from her poetry—­Madame Rosetti—­Her
patriotism and adventures—­M. Constantin
A. Rosetti—­His career and public services—­M.
Bratiano—­Other leaders of public opinion—­The
party of progress—­Their past foreign
and domestic policy—­Geographical boundaries—­Panslavism
and Panroumanism—­The future policy of Roumania—­Growth
by pacific means—­(Note: Comparative
values of Russian, Turkish, and Roumanian securities)—­Roumania
and Great Britain—­Conclusion.

I.

We have passed in hasty and imperfect review those
features in the national life of Roumania which we
believed would be of interest to our readers, and
will now endeavour to present to them sketches of a
few of the persons of distinction who are forming
public opinion, and are the leaders of progress in
the country, premising, however, that there are many
omissions, due partly to our own ignorance, and partly
to the fact that the discussion of the merits and
demerits of some of the public men would not have
been fitting in this treatise.